Gender and gnosis: Making Mary male, making Jesus female

Lloyd D. Graham

In the final saying of the Gospel of Thomas (logion 114), Jesus speaks of needing to
make Mary male so that she can enter the kingdom. Similarly, the male/female dyad is
interpreted spiritually as a positive/negative opposition by many of today’s traditional
societies. This paper explores maleness with respect to Mary Magdalene and the Virgin
Mary from literary, symbolic and scientific perspectives, and considers recent medical
rationalizations of Jesus’s miraculous conception. Unexpected Gnostic and Christian
parallels are found in the mythic/ritual structure of the Gimi people of Papua New Guinea,
which encompasses the necessity of uniting sexual opposites in male form, as well as
virgin birth. We also identify gender concepts relevant to the Coptic Gnostic writings in
ancient Egyptian religion. The medieval feminization of Jesus – mainly achieved by
interpreting the wound in his side as a vagina or breast – provides a later counterweight to
the Gnostic masculinizing of Mary. Ultimately, it seems preferable to interpret the side-
wound as a surgical incision through which the rib/Eve can be reinserted back into Adam,
a transformation to a “dual-gender male” that restores the primal unity. For women, this
unity is probably more constructively imaged as a female with a male core, a “phallic
female” form of Eve; the template for this dates back at least to Neolithic times.
Refractory paradoxes like these warn that gender-based analogies of spirit are inherently
limited and must be transcended.

Seeking for far-away parallels affords exciting entertainment, but

is largely useless with respect to logion 114. […] Comparative
endeavors – tantalizing as they may be – often lead astray.1

It’s important for the explorer to be willing to be led astray.

[…] Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world; look at
something and think what else it might be.2

The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is a component of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of

Coptic Gnostic scriptures discovered in upper Egypt in 1945.3 Thomas is thought to have
originally been composed in Greek;4 indeed, its text is attested in three Greek papyrus
fragments (Fig. 1; dated to ca. 200 CE) from Oxyrhynchus, another Egyptian site.56
Thomas, which belongs to the tradition of wisdom literature, is a collection of the
“sayings of Jesus.”7 Its opening reads: “These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus
spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin recorded. And he said, ‘Whoever discovers the
interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.’”8 Most of the sayings are cryptic,
subversive or paradoxical,9 with a function reminiscent of the kōan in Zen Buddhism.10,11
For example, logion (i.e., saying) 105 reads “Jesus said, ‘Whoever knows the father and
the mother will be called the child of a whore;’” logion 14 begins “Jesus said to them, ‘If
you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and

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 Fig. 1. A Greek fragment of the Gospel of Thomas. (P. Oxy. 1).12

if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits;’” while in logion 11, Jesus says “On the
day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you
do?”13 Richard Valantasis, in an approach endorsed by Marvin Meyer,14 views the
intention of Thomas as “performative theology” because true understanding only emerges
from the active and creative response of the listener/reader to the challenges posed by the
sayings.15

Thomas is perhaps the most important of what are collectively known as the Gnostic
Gospels because many scholars believe that it is an early work. While the age of Thomas
and its relation to the canonical gospels are hotly debated, the Coptic document is
provisionally dated to the early 2nd century CE.16 However, since a number of its cryptic
sayings appear in a simplified form on Jesus’s lips in the synoptic gospels, where they are
often followed by an allegory-based interpretation, there are grounds for believing that
the original edition of Thomas predates the canonical gospels.17 Thomas is also
independent of Q, the (lost) compendium of Jesus’s sayings used by Matthew and Luke.18
As Marvin Meyer puts it, “an excellent case can be made for the position that the Gospel
of Thomas is not fundamentally dependent upon the New Testament gospels, but that it

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preserves sayings that at times appear to be more original than the New Testament
parallels.”19 Richard Valantasis assesses the oldest core of sayings in Thomas as dating to
60-70 CE.20 Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar (an academic group of over 200
scholars whose remit is the search for authenticity in the Jesus tradition), suggests that the
original editions of Thomas and Q date to 50-60 CE.21

As a representative of the Jesus Seminar,22 Funk also contends that – in contrast to many
of the words attributed to Jesus by the canonical gospels – some of the sayings recorded
in Thomas go back to the historical Jesus.23,24 Indeed, since the historical Jesus that the
Seminar recovered is a humble itinerant sage who was “irreligious, irreverent and
impious,”25 who used paradox and parody to articulate an open-ended, non-explicit
vision,26 it seems that the raw and provocative sayings attributed to Jesus by Thomas
capture the tone of his ministry far better than the sanitized platitudes and morality tales
presented by the canonical gospels. In the words of Harold Bloom,
…one of the effects of the Gospel of Thomas […] is to undo the Jesus of the New Testa-
ment and return us to an earlier Jesus. […] If the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas is also to
be regarded as a literary character, then at least he […] will be the right literary
character.”27
Unlike the canonical gospels, that of Judas Thomas the Twin spares us the crucifixion,
makes the resurrection unnecessary, and does not present us with a God named Jesus. No
dogmas could be founded upon this sequence (if it is a sequence) of apogems. If you turn to
the Gospel of Thomas, you encounter a Jesus who is unsponsored and free.28

Gender in Gnostic literature

Logion 114, the final item of the Gospel of Thomas, is one of its most controversial
sayings. It reads as follows:
Simon Peter said to them, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.” Jesus
said, “Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit
resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven’s
kingdom.”
Although shocking to modern readers, the sentiment expressed by logion 114 is not
unique or without precedent in Gnostic literature.29 A gender-transformation of the same
kind is found in the First Apocalypse of James, which states “the perishable has gone up
to the imperishable, and the female element has attained to this male element.”30 The
eponymous protagonist of Zostrianos anticipates a similar transgendering for his female
readers when they are urged to “Flee from the madness and the bondage of femaleness,
and choose for yourselves the salvation of maleness.”31 Related sentiments, in which
females are again required to become male in order to attain salvation, can be found in
Valentinian and Naassene writings.32 There are also references to the transcending rather
than the exchange of gender as essential to spiritual progress. For example, in logion 22
of Thomas, Jesus says “when you make the male and female into a single one, so that the
male will not be male nor the female be female […] then you will enter the kingdom.”33

The Gnostic literature repeatedly associates the female with the earthly and corruptible,
and the male with the spiritual and incorruptible.34,35 Female sexuality in particular is a

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target; for instance, the Book of Thomas the Contender has Jesus say “Woe to you who
love intimacy with womankind and polluted intercourse with them.”36 Inseparable from
this, of course, is female fertility, whose negative potential is often emphasised. In the
Second Discourse of the Great Seth, Jesus says “And do not become female, lest you give
birth to evil and its brothers: jealousy and division, anger and wrath, fear and a divided
heart, and empty, non-existent desire.”37 An instruction in the Dialogue of the Saviour
even commands us to “Destroy the works of womanhood.”38 In contrast, maleness was
repeatedly identified with spirit, truth and the divine.39 The mindset of the ancient world
was patriarchal to the point of misogyny.

Sex and spirit in traditional and ancient societies

It is both interesting and sobering to note that such spiritually negative interpretations of
female gender and sexuality often have counterparts in the mythic/ritual structures of
traditional societies today.40 Paradoxically, “sexuality is […] opposed to fertility. It is
associated with flesh, decomposition and women, while true ancestral fertility is a
mystical process symbolised by the tomb and the (male) bones.”41,42 Thus, for the Merina
people of Madagascar, “physical birth – which is represented as an exclusively female
activity – is polluting, and is subsequently transcended by the circumcision ceremony at
which the child is torn away from the divisive and impure world of women to be born
into the pure and undivided world of the [male] descent group.”43 The belief structure of
the Lugbara of Uganda and the Bara of Madagascar “identifies women with sexuality and
sexuality with death. Victory over death […] is symbolically achieved by a victory over
female sexuality and the word of women.”44

Marija Gimbutas postulated that the people of Old Europe (7000-3000 BCE) venerated a
great Mother Goddess.45 The goddess’s innate androgyny was reified in the form of
“phallic female” statuettes (Fig. 2a-c),46 a visual paradox that survived or re-emerged in
some later cultures (Fig. 3), and that in certain regions persists to the present day (Fig.
4).47 In her holistic form, where she acted both as creator and destroyer, she was
responsible for the full cycle of birth, death and rebirth.48 In Gimbutas’s view, the
peaceful matriarchal culture of Old Europe “did not divide the great-goddess into
fragments of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’” as did the patriarchal and warlike proto-Indo-European
society that subjugated them (4400-2800 BCE).49 Unsurprisingly, the latter also
introduced a hierarchical pantheon headed by male deities. Naturally, the goddess whose
figure is an embodied phallus – which “in its most ‘extreme’ form […] would have
redefined manhood as a mere tool for the realisation of female identity”50 – did not fare
well. From the fragments of the prehistoric female androgyne arose her alter ego, the
male androgyne: castrati such as the “sorrowful gods” or “year gods,” who have provided
a major archetype of fertility deity in literate cultures for the past 5000 years. However,
as Stella Richards points out, “only the female androgyne can embody both complete sets
of genitalia. Male androgynes [i.e., castrated male gods] gain breasts, but at the expense

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 (a) (b) (c)
Fig. 2. Neolithic phallic female figurines. (a) Starčevo culture, ca. 5600-5300 BCE, Endröd-
Szujókereszt, Körös valley, southeastern Hungary. 51 The identification of this statuette as a
phallic female is contested by its discoverer.52 (b) Mehtélek figurine, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg,
Northern Great Plain of eastern Hungary.53 (c) Cucuteni-Tripolye goddess figurine, 4900-4750 BCE.54

of both womb and phallus. As a result, male androgynes are sterile whereas female
androgynes are abundantly fertile, in an orgy of self-pollination.” In this way, Richards
argues, the original matriarchal consciousness of the earth as a place of pleasure and
prolific abundance was supplanted by a patriarchal mindset of “scarcity, struggle and
sacrifice.”55 In the Judeo-Christian creation story, this view was reflected in mankind’s
expulsion from the Garden of Eden to a life of toil and adversity (Gen 3:14-19).

In many of today’s traditional societies, including those discussed above, men have again
divided the great goddess into opposing characteristics. Having done so, they then
appropriated to themselves what they saw as her positive aspects (fertility, creation),
leaving the women with her negative ones (corruption, death).56 In essence, they split the
primal androgyne into a dyad in which a constellation of male/good attributes is opposed
to a constellation of female/bad ones. This act of male usurpation did not go unnoticed;
we find that many such peoples have myths that describe how ritual power once belonged
to the women but was stolen from them by the men, who still control it today.57 One can
adduce examples from Papua New Guinea,58 Australia,59 Amazonia,60 Africa61 and
beyond.62 As Francisco Vaz da Silva puts it, “Anthropologists have long ago realized that
institutionalized attempts by men to figuratively fulfill female functions […] reveal that
men’s social authority involves symbolical appropriation of feminine power.”63 We might

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 (a) (b)

Fig. 3. Iron Age phallic female figurines. (a) (Presumed from) Amlash culture, Northern Iran,
ca. 1200-900 BCE, earthenware.64 (b) Amlash culture, Iran, 10th-8th century BCE, ceramic.65,66

(a) (b)

Fig. 4. Gudza fertility dolls. (a,b) Terracotta, modern; Samburu or

Turkana peoples of northern Kenya.67

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also note Conan Kennedy’s observation that “priests of all cultures invariably adopt
female attire. This is because, in their function, they are descended from priestesses. At
the very beginning the Gods were female, and their priest[s] likewise.”68 It is ironic that,
as a man in female dress,69 the priest serves as a reminder of the disenfranchised phallic
female goddess: a male core in a female shell (Figs. 2-4).

Like many of today’s traditional societies, the ancient world of the Mediterranean and
Near East subscribed to a hierarchical, patriarchal and adversarial world-view. In such a
milieu, which of course encompassed much Indo-European heritage, it again was only
natural to find gender-based metaphors of spirit that favoured the male. Aristotle (384-
322 BCE) taught that the mother provided the matter of the foetus and the father its life or
spirit.70 Accordingly, maleness was used to signify the heavenly, spiritual and enduring,
while femaleness signified the earthly, corporeal and perishable.71 The doctrine became
integrated into Hellenistic Judaism, prompting Philo of Alexandria (ca. 25 BCE-50 CE)
to conclude that progress “is indeed nothing else than the giving up of the female gender
by changing into the male,” a sentiment of obvious relevance to logion 114 of Thomas.72
Gnostics typically associated the female archetype with the cycle of earthly life and death,
but – in an inversion of pagan fertility-goddess cults – they rejected her as deficient and
blamed her for what they saw as a death-cycle,73,74 a corrupt creation that was inherently
evil. St. Jerome (ca. 347-420 CE) perpetuated and developed the Aristotelian dichotomy
within normative Christianity, declaring that “As long as a woman is for birth and
children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve
Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called man.”75
Aristotle’s gendered spirit/body paradigm persisted even into the Middle Ages. In
medieval Europe, the spirit continued to be identified with the male, while the physical
body of flesh and blood was identified with the female.76 In keeping with this, the Cathars
– members of a heterodox dualist movement in 12th-14th century France and Italy –
believed that women entering heaven would be changed into men.77

Occasionally, a contra-Aristotelian interpretation of gender has arisen. For example, in

the mid-18th century, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (Fig. 5), a founder of the

Fig. 5. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von

Zinzendorf. A portrait of this founder of
the Moravian Brotherhood by Balthasar
Denner (1685-1749).78

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Protestant movement known as the Moravian Brotherhood, “taught the single brothers
that they were only provisionally men and that they too were to become sisters in the
afterlife; [… indeed,] Zinzendorf theorized that men were actually ‘maidens in temporary
male housing.’”79 His son, Christian Renatus, had gone so far as to declare all single
brothers to be sisters. In 1748-9, he had consecrated the single brethren at Herrnhaag,
Marienborn and Zeist into their new state so that they might better serve in their marriage
to Christ, the Holy Bridegroom.80 This reversal of the usual androcentric gender
paradigm was short-lived, being denounced in 1750 by Zinzendorf’s son-in-law,
Johannes de Watteville, an important Moravian leader.81 Below, we shall encounter the
Moravian Unity again in connection with the side-wound of Christ.

Completeness, sex and genetics

In medieval medical theory, “a female child was seen as simply an incomplete male.”82 In
modern human genetics, femaleness is known to be conferred by the presence of two X-
chromosomes in the cell nucleus (XX), maleness by the presence of an X- and a Y-
chromosome (XY). Tritely, the female could be seen as “genetically incomplete,” in the
sense that her cells contain only 23 different types of chromosome whereas the male’s
contain all 24. The popular notion that the Y-chromosome is just a vestigial remnant of
the X-chromosome is based on the fact that the former looks like an incomplete version
of the latter and is one-fifth its size,83 coupled with the fact that the two share a common
ancestral origin.84 However, after 170-300 million years of differential evolution,85 only
3% of the ancestral gene repertoire survives on the Y-chromosome, whereas 98% of it
survives on the X-chromosome.86 Some animals have dispensed completely with theY-
chromosome.87 Fears (or, amongst some feminist extremists, hopes) that the human Y-
chromosome would “rot away entirely” are unfounded,88 as some of its remaining genes
are essential for male viability.89,90 Gene loss over the last 25 million years has in fact
been negligible,91,92 and remodelling and regeneration have dominated the last 6 million
years.93 Some of the Y-linked genes are unique, and even those with X-chromosomal
counterparts differ subtly from them,94 so it is incorrect to claim that the Y- is just a
subset of the X-chromosome. Interestingly, the X-chromosome has acquired some male-
specific genes during its evolution,95,96,97 while the Y-chromosome has belatedly acquired
some X-chromosome genes.98 A Gnostic geneticist might see these unexpected events as
evolutionary steps towards “making Mary male” and “making Jesus female.”

Like the tally of different chromosomes, developmental biology and anatomy also reflect
the idea that there is more to the male. As Ann Oakley observes in her classic book, Sex,
Gender and Society, “It seems clear that […] the basic human form is female and
masculinity comes about as the result of something ‘added.’”99 Any male elitism
encouraged by simplistic “more is better” thinking (whether anatomical or chromosomal)
soon encounters opposition, such as the perfectly valid assertion that, since the default
human is female, the male is a variant.100 An identification of the male as “non-standard”
is sometimes accompanied by the more controversial claim that the Y-chromosome is
some kind of contaminant.101 In The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof argues that the cultural
representation of DNA is routinely distorted by mainstream patriarchal agendas,102 but
from the foregoing observations we can see that counter-narratives also exist.103

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While genetic arguments (in either direction) for sexual supremacy are futile, we now
know that it takes only a small decrease in the functionality of the sex-determining Sry
gene on the Y-chromosome to cause sex reversal to the female body plan, a point to
which (in the form of Swyer syndrome) we will return below.104 This fragility, which
forms a striking contrast with the robustness of other major developmental pathways,105
means that human males invariably develop near the edge of sexual ambiguity.
Embryologically, at least, it is far easier to make Jesus (more) female than to make Mary
(more) male. Empowered by this brief preview of sex as determined by one’s
chromosomal complement, let us now reprise our scriptural exploration with a
consideration of Mary’s identity.

Mary, Mary…

Mary Magdalene (Fig. 6) was one of Jesus’s followers,106 and all of the New Testament
gospels place her as the first witness – or one of the first witnesses – of Jesus’s
resurrection (Matt 28:1-10; Mark 16:1-11; Luke 24:1-12; John 20:1-18). Described as
having been exorcised of seven demons (Mark 16:9; Luke 8:2), Mary Magdalene has
long been identified (almost certainly incorrectly) with a range of other women: an
anonymous female sinner who anointed Jesus’s feet, an unnamed woman caught in
adultery, Mary of Bethany, and a Samaritan woman that Jesus met at Jacob’s Well.107
Around 591 CE, Pope Gregory the Great delivered a homily that made official the
identification of Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and the sinner who had anointed
Jesus’s feet; he also consolidated this composite woman as a prostitute.108 This remained
Catholic doctrine until 1969.109

More importantly for our purposes, there has also been a longstanding enmeshment of
Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary.110,111 The gospels were populated by a “muddle of
Marys,”112 and “the Alexandrine method of textual analysis tended to produce a certain
amount of ambiguity in relation to Marian identity. […] Consequently, the personae of
the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen were not as entirely distinct as their individual

Fig. 6. Mary Magdalene.

Detail from Mary Magdalen
in Penitence by El Greco
(1541-1614). 113

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biographies might suggest.”114 In his Twentieth Discourse, Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. 315-
387) condensed them, and two other Marys as well, into a single woman.115 In Syria,
…in the typology of the Church the figure of the Virgin Mary was conflated with that of Mary
Magdalen in the scene of the resurrection, in a deliberate and systematic ‘superimposition’ of
the Marys, which reflected the confusion over the Marys in the gospels in which the early
Church found itself. […] This eastern tradition was known in the Middle Ages in the west where
it was taken up and used by homilists, playwrights and artists who saw that it was only
appropriate that [the risen] Christ should first appear to his mother.”116
The same substitution is found in a Coptic text called the Book of the Resurrection of
Christ, where (in a subversion of John 20:16-17) it is the Virgin who calls the risen Jesus
“Rabboni” and is not allowed to touch him.117

For the Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Philip, various scholars “have come to the
recognition the “Mary” in this gospel is best understood as not being a single figure but
rather as a conflation […;] the Mary of Philip is sometimes Mary of Magdala, sometimes
Mary of Nazareth, but also a conflation of both.”118 The same logic extends to the Gospel
of Thomas; Marvin Meyer, for example, nominates Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary
as the two most likely candidates for its Mary,119 but finds it safer to think that “a
‘universal Mary’ is in mind, and that specific historical Marys are no longer clearly
distinguished.”120

Both Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary are extremely feminine figures. This is
evident from the epithets “Bride of Christ” (cf. Rev 19:7-8) and “New Eve,” which – in a
further example of their entanglement – both of them have shared. For Mary Magdalene,
the first epithet may be considered to refer to her identification by Hippolytus of Rome
(170-235 CE) with the Bride in the Song of Songs,121 or to her role as Jesus’s real-life
consort in some of the Gnostic literature;122,123 for the Virgin Mary, it may refer to her
identification by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153 CE) with the Bride in the Song,124
or it may be a mystical title that honours her as a personification of the Church.125 The
identification of Mary Magdalene as a “second Eve” is again attributed to Hippolytus;126
he paired Eve’s poor judgement, which condemned all subsequent generations of
mankind, with the Magdalene’s penitence and faith, which allowed her to announce the
resurrection and thus show all future generations the path to redemption.127 The Virgin
Mary’s identification as the New Eve owes much to her obedience and submission to the
will of God (Luke 1:38) and to the reflections of St. Irenaeus (2nd century CE).128
Moreover, the traditional identification of the child-bearing Woman of the Apocalypse as
Mary has her prevail over the celestial dragon (Rev 12:1-8), “that ancient serpent” (Rev
12:9), thereby reversing Eve’s capitulation to the serpent in Eden (Gen 3:1-8).129 For
either of the two Marys, the appellation “New Eve” reinforces the idea of her as a
spiritual marriage partner for Christ, the New Adam.130,131

Of necessity, the titles “Bride of Christ” and “New Eve” also connote a prototypical
female, a womanly paradigm. The female identity of the protagonists is reinforced in
different ways. Pope Gregory’s homily confirmed the long-standing tradition that Mary
Magdalene was formerly a prostitute, whereas the Virgin Mary’s gender is highlighted in
the gospels by the fact that she gives birth. In two other instances of cross-over between

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 (a) (b)
Fig. 7. Mandorla of the Virgin. (a) “Vagina Mary” figurine; artist unknown.132 Objectors
to this image as an inappropriate representation of sanctity are reminded that, on balance, it
is likely that God has a sense of humour,133 and also that “Jesus was a comic savant […
who] mixed humor with subversive and troubling knowledge.” 134 , 135 (b) Our Lady of
Guadalupe, by Isidro Escamilla, ca. 1824. 136 In other representations, the mandorla is
represented by a more geometric vesica piscis.

the two Marys, both of which focus on sex and sexuality, we should note the similarity of
the Virgin’s mandorla to a vulva (Fig. 7a,b) and the “re-virginizing” of Mary Magdalene
that was attested during the Middle Ages.137

It is worth noting in passing that, considered collectively in a conflation of Church and

Gnostic traditions, the two Marys encompass a manifestation of the archetypal triune
goddess;138 the three aspects of virgin, mother and lover/whore139,140,141 are here present
in the two persons of the Virgin Mother and Jesus’s consort, the latter long maligned as a
former prostitute. The triad again collapses to a dyad in the Madonna-whore complex, a
male intimacy disorder identified by Sigmund Freud142 that is not without a mythic
dimension.143 Of course, in terms of ancient religion, the virgin and the whore are just the
opposite faces of the same coin:
The real Goddess from time immemorial has been celebrated by either prostitute-priestesses or
virgin-priestesses. The difference between prostitute and virgin in this case is, in liturgical terms,
merely a modest technical difference similar to such as might arise between Methodist and
Presbyterian. […] The fact is that female sexuality was considered essential in the service of the
Goddess.144
Perhaps this equivalence provided a further (albeit unconscious) impetus for the
compounding of the two Marys in Christian tradition.

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In modern times, Mary Magdalene has been identified as a representation of the “sacred
feminine,” her partnership with Jesus fulfilling the role of an earth goddess in a hieros
gamos (sacred marriage) with the sacrificial sky-god.145,146 In the “lost feminine” theory
popularized by Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code,147 the female half of the partnership has
long been denied and suppressed by the institutional patriarchy of the Church. While
much of the mythos now attached to this concept is either highly speculative or modern
fiction,148 the basic principle aligns well with the medieval attribution to Mary Magdalene
of some of the functions of a fertility goddess.149 For example, the 13th-century Golden
Legend contains several stories that show how Mary Magdalene helps women to con-
ceive and protects their children, while other legends indicate that her tomb was a site of
pilgrimage for couples who wanted a child. The Virgin Mary, of course, has always had a
natural association with motherhood, and has long been adored in a manner befitting a
goddess.150 Thus, once again, we find unexpected parallels between the two women.

Has either Mary ever shown any male characteristics? For Mary Magdalene, the later
Gnostic literature – such as the Pistis Sophia (3rd-4th century CE) – portrays her as
assertive in a way that relegates the male disciples to the sidelines, much to the
annoyance of Peter in particular.151 Jesus exhorted his apostles to “ put on the perfect
man,”152 and some scholars have suggested that “Mary Magdalene feels this interior man
in herself, and, identifying with him, understands All.”153 It seems to me that the “phallic
female” statuettes (Figs. 2-4) make concrete this sort of concept; overtly, Mary is a
woman, but cryptically she is a manifestation of “maleness” in the spiritual idiom of the
ancient world. While Mary would almost certainly not have described her enlightened
sense of self using a visual paradox that borders on the comical, it is likely that she would
have understood and identified with the symbolism of such a figurine if she had
encountered one. Of the phallic female, Patricia Reis writes:
What does it mean for a woman to have her own sense of an inner phallus? In the figurines
it is not the outer phallus – the probing, seeking, erection – so much as it is a sustaining,
supportive inner core. In the images from the paleolithic and neolithic eras, the phallic
element tends to be in the upper part of the body, the neck and the head providing an axis
around which the rest of the body is organized. […] She is an image that is complete – unto
herself.154
Other glimpses of the Magdalene-as-male may exist in the Gnostic literature. In the
Gospel of Mary 9:18-20, a potential parapraxis has Mary say to the disciples who are
grieving Jesus’s death “let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us
into men.” In the Acts of Philip (4th century CE), Jesus instructs Mary to disguise herself
as a man so that the serpents of Opheorymos do not mistake her for Eve and, in one
recension of the narrative, she replies “I am not a woman.”155 And, of course, if Mary
Magdalene is in fact the unnamed “beloved disciple” in the Gospel of John,156 rather than
John himself (as conventionally believed) (Fig. 8), then – in this role, at least – she had
obligingly morphed into a man by the end of the 1st century CE.

In contrast, the Virgin Mary has never displayed any male characteristics – until very
recently. The advent of modern science and medicine has prompted a number of

12
 Fig. 8. The “Beloved Disciple.”
This individual is represented by
the female-looking figure on Jesus’s
right in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last
Supper. The image shows a detail
from a 16th-century Italian copy (oil
on canvas) of the famous fresco,157
which is used here for its superior
clarity over the troubled original. In
Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the
beloved disciple – who is seemingly
being threatened by Peter – is
identified as Mary Magdalene.158

biologists and physicians to propose alternatives to divine intervention in the biblical

account of Jesus’s miraculous conception and birth (Luke 1:26-45; 2:1-12). It comes as a
surprise to many to learn that such theories require the Virgin Mary to be wholly or partly
male.159 Proposals of this kind will be considered in the next section.

…Quite contrary

Above, we learned that the sex-chromosome combination required for a male human
embryo is XY. Even if we allow the idea of spontaneous conception (a phenomenon
known to occur in several animal species), the XX mother – having no source of a Y-
chromosome – can only generate female embryos, whereas Jesus was male.160 Some
medical conditions might seem to allow the spontaneous birth of a male child from an
apparent female. For example, individuals with complete androgen insensitivity
syndrome (CAIS) are XY, but a defective androgen receptor gene causes them to develop
externally as a female. One geneticist has recently proposed this condition for Mary.161
Amongst many problems, one of the biggest is that her body would have lacked both a
uterus and ovaries.162 A better candidate would be Swyer syndrome, a condition which
(as explained above) is caused by a mutation that impairs the function of the Y-
chromosome’s Sry gene.163 This Mary too would be genetically male yet somatically
female, but in this case with a womb and fallopian tubes.164 The gonads (testes/ovaries)
remain undeveloped in such individuals, so this Mary would still be infertile, and thus
another fulfilment of Stella Richards’s condemnation of male androgynes to sterility. On
the other hand, a recent report describes an Sry-inactivating mutation in CBX2 – a
chromosome 17 gene senior to Sry in the sex-determination cascade – that gave rise to an

13
XY girl “born with a completely normal female phenotype, including uterus and
histologically normal ovaries,” who may yet develop into a fertile woman.165 Whatever
the circumstances, the CAIS, Sry and CBX2 proposals all require a spontaneous
correction (i.e., back-mutation) of the defective gene in a self-conceived male embryo for
it develop a normal male body.166 Statistically, this alone is exceedingly unlikely.

The accidental fusion of twin embryos of opposite sex results in a child with tetragametic
chimerism;167 its body is a mixture of XX and XY cells. An adult chimera of this type
could theoretically become the virgin mother of a male child. Prof. M. Kemal Irmak has
recently proposed that Mary was just such a male/female chimera.168,169 Since XX cells
tend to gather on the left side of chimeras, whereas XY cells prefer the right, he proposes
that an ovary and oviduct developed in Mary’s left side and a testis developed in her right.
The model assumes that both gonads become functional after puberty, i.e. that Mary was
a true hermaphrodite.170 At the time of ovulation, he conjectures, the oocyte would be
sucked into the sole oviduct along with spermatozoa in the peritoneal cavity that had
originated in the testis. The higher temperature on the left side of the body, Irmak
continues, would favour fertilization by sperm bearing a Y-chromosome; all known
pregnancies in chimeric hermaphrodites have involved male fetuses. Fertilization in
Mary’s body would yield an XY embryo that would develop into a normal male child,
namely Jesus. While more plausible than most such schemes, Irmak’s heroic hypothesis
still requires an extraordinary nexus of coincidences for successful conception, much less
gestation. Achieving the sequence of fortuitous improbabilities needed to arrive at such a
Mary and realise such a pregnancy would, in effect, constitute a miracle.

Let us now segue from embryology to etymology in order to note that Irmak’s Mary has
symbolic as well as biological value. The fertilization of an egg by a sperm produces a
zygote (from the Greek zygōtos, “yoked” or “joined”), so one could refer to the fusion of
two zygotes that causes tetragametic chimerism as a dizygotic fusion, i.e., a dizygy or
dyzygy. Syzygy, a term from the same root meaning “yoked together,” is central to
Valentinian Gnosticism, where it represents the paired emanations of God. Sygygy is “the
linking together of complementary qualities (‘Aeons’) to form a state of wholeness
(pleroma). This is the highest level of reality. The halves of a syzygy are often referred to
as male and female.”171 The XY/XX chimeric Mary is, of course, just such a holistic
union of male and female: dyzygy as syzygy.

The theological implications of Irmak’s Mary are not exhausted by syzygy. The chimeric
Mary could outcompete her son for the title of “New Adam,” insofar as she matches a
prevalent rabbinic understanding of Adam in early Talmudic times.172 In this view, the
Adam of Gen 1:27 (to whom we shall return below) was believed to be a hermaphrodite
composed of a male side and a female side; woman was formed from his side, his female
half.173 In this idiom, the XY/XX chimeric Mary (who is male on the right side, female
on the left) is more the New Adam than the New Eve.

A high-level view of Christological history, including the recent developments presented

above, is instructive. Such an overview reveals the cyclic symmetry inherent in the

14
transformation of a material event (conception of a baby boy) into a spiritual construct
(the divine conception of Jesus), then back into a material entity (the hermaphrodite Mary)
and finally into other spiritual constructs (chimeric Mary as Gnostic syzygy or as the
New Adam). It is important to note the ease with which such manifestations and
transformations can be misunderstood. Specifically, we need to be aware that someone
who insists on miracles to prove spiritual truths is ontologically indistinguishable from
someone who seeks to rationalize miracles in order to deny the spiritual realm; both are in
fact materialists.174

Past and present parallels to Gnostic/Christian concepts of gender, spirit and

transformation

Since the Gnostic Gospels are Coptic documents that were discovered in Egypt, and since
several major Gnostic leaders emerged from Alexandria,175 the indigenous beliefs of pre-
Christian Egyptians may be relevant to some Gnostic concepts.176 For example, in ancient
Egyptian mythology, the dead – male and female – become identified with the male god
of the afterlife, Osiris.177 Moreover, Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BCE,
asserted (in line with Aristotle) that the ancient Egyptians “have taken the general
position that the father is the sole author of procreation and that the mother only supplies
the foetus with nourishment and a place to live.”178 In Egyptian mythology, Isis – the
goddess representing divine womanhood in ancient Egypt – conceived Horus by a
necrophilic interaction with the body of her husband, Oisiris. Consistent with Diodorus’s
claim, a late Lamentation of Isis text has her explain this “almost parthenogenetic act” 179
not by appealing to her innate power of maternity but by saying “I made myself into a
man, even though I was a woman.”180 Modern researchers have suggested identifications
of Isis with both Mary Magdalene181,182,183 and the Virgin Mary.184,185 Isis was known in
Palestine/Israel for centuries before the birth of either Mary, and was popular there for
centuries afterwards.186

Interestingly, some of today’s traditional societies have mythologies that reiterate this
concept of male reproductive supremacy and then relate it to female maleness and indeed
to virgin birth. For example, the Gimi people of Papua New Guinea believe that each girl
is solely the product of her father, and that “Even a female child is symbolically male in
the sense that it is wholly derived from the father or his ancestors.”187 Moreover, they
believe that the girl is born with her father’s semen already inside her, which develops
into a foetus.188 Eventually “the ‘father’s child’ she possesses from birth – as a virgin” is
killed by the introduction of her (real or symbolic) husband’s semen, and emerges dead in
the form of menstrual blood.189,190

The belief system of the Gimi may offer further insights into cryptic allusions within
Gnostic literature. Until the practice was recently suppressed, Gimi women would cook
and eat the body of a deceased male to speed up the release of his spirit and minimise its
exposure to physical corruption and decay. The spirit of the dead man becomes captured
in the bodies of the women, making them ritually male; the final release of the spirit
(back to the ancestral reservoir of the forest) is then arranged by the men of the tribe.191

15
One cannot but be reminded of Jesus’s words in Thomas 12:3, “During the days when
you ate what is dead, you made it alive.”192 Whether there are lessons in such traditional
customs for the interpretation of this and other eating/transformation sayings of Thomas,
such as logia 7 and 60,193 is an open question. Other cryptic statements on a similar theme
include the Gospel of Philip 62:35-63:1, “God is a man-eater. For this reason men are
sacrificed to him,” 55:4-5, “As for man, they offered him up to God dead, and he lived,”
and 73:19-23, “This world is a corpse-eater. All things eaten in it themselves die also.
Truth is a life-eater. Therefore no none nourished by truth will die.”194

In a medieval resurfacing of the Gnostic theme of consuming humans, the 14th-century

Strassburg tract known as Schwester Katrei has Jesus send his disciples to search for food,
but find only a dead man. “Christ said, ‘Then go and eat him!’ The disciples said, ‘Alas,
shall we eat a dead man?’ Christ said, ‘It is better that you eat the dead than the living.”195
Beyond Gnosticism, of course, one is reminded of the symbolic consumption of human
flesh and blood in the eucharist of normative Christianity. In medieval Europe, it seemed
to some female communicants that the horror and filth of the biological world (“where
the liquefaction of dissolution was the ultimate insult”196) could actually pollute God via
contamination of the host, prompting one scholar to describe such piety as “an affective
devotion to the body of […] Jesus that carried with it overtones of cannibalism and
contamination.”197,198 This nexus of concepts is disturbingly similar to the one motivating
ritual necrophagy by Gimi women.

The wound of Christ

While the mythic constructs of the Gimi may strike us as bizarre, they are surely no more
startling than the late medieval Christian presentation of the wound in the side of the
crucified Jesus (John 19:34) as a vagina, through which the faithful may enter into eternal
life and from which the Church is born. Regarding the first theme, William of St. Thierry
(ca. 1085-1148) wrote a passage on “entering into the side of Christ.”199 Flora Lewis, a
modern scholar, remarks that “The wound in Christ’s side could be seen as female and
yet explored by men, as a site of union between sponsus and sponsa,” i.e., between
husband and wife.200 On the theme of birth, St. Augustine says: “just as Eve was brought
forth from the side of Adam, so from the side of the Second Adam, sleeping inclinato
capite on the Cross, was brought forth the Church, the Spouse of Christ.”201 This
parturition is depicted figuratively in some medieval art (Fig. 9).202,203,204

The medieval feminization of Jesus provides a sustained antiphon to the Gnostic

masculinizing of Mary, forming the yin to its yang, and so it is worth examining the
phenomenon in some detail. The origin of the concept may date back as far as the 4th
century,205 insofar as Epiphanius of Salamis condemns a Gnostic text “in which Jesus
brought forth from his side a woman.”206 The sexualization of the side-wound was still
being developed in the mid-18th century by members of the Moravian Unity,207 whose
intense desire for Christ was expressed in erotic metaphors that were focused upon the
side-wound and were sometimes interpreted literally.208

16
 Fig. 9. The birth of Eve and
of the Church. The figure
shows two birth scenes from
a French Bible moralisée, ca.
1240. The upper image shows
Eve being born from Adam’s
side, and the lower one shows
the Church being born from
the side of the crucified
Christ.209,210

Luis of Granada (1508-1588) wrote a series of exclamations extolling the side-wound’s

virtues:
O wounde of the pretious syde of my sweete Sauiour, made rather with his feruent loue
towardes mankinde, than with the sharpe iron of the cruell speare! O gate of heauen! O
windowe of paradise! O place of refuge! O tower of strength! O sanctuarie of iust persons:
O sepulchre of pilgrims! O neist of cleane doues! O flourishinge bed of the spouse of
Salomon! Alhaile O wounde of the pretious syde of our Sauiour, that woundest the hartes
of deuout persons!211
The sexual imagery of the bedchamber is notable, and by no means unique to this text.212
The theme of the dove (Song 2:14), touched on by Luis, is present in expanded form in
the Middle English Quia Amore Langueo poems. There, Christ says:
In my syde I haf made hyr nest,
loke in me how wyde a wound is here!
This is hyr chambre, here shall she rest,
that she and I may slepe in fere.213

17
Conventionally, this dove is understood to be an allegory of the Church,214 the Bride of
Christ (Eph 5:22-33); “fere,” the last word of the excerpt, is an archaic term for a
companion or spouse. The mystical entry of a female consort through the side-wound,215
with a view to permanent reintegration into the male body, will be reprised closer to the
end of this paper.

In the late Middle Ages, it was believed that the exact dimensions of the wound were
known, although the size varies from one source to another. Some measurements were
declared to be the result of revelation.216 In this period, however, several churches
claimed to possess the Holy Lance that had caused the wound (John 19:31-37), so it
would be interesting to investigate whether any of the specified measurements match the
width of any of these blades. The main contenders for what Luis of Granada called “the
sharpe iron of the cruell speare” are currently held in Rome, Vienna, and Echmiadzin
(Armenia);217 visually, the most impressive is the one in Vienna (Fig. 10).218

Irrespective of how the measurement was obtained, dimensionally correct reproductions

of Christ’s side-wound were thought to become the wound itself and thereby possess
miraculous powers.219 Representations of the aperture (often as a red mandorla shape or
vesica piscis; Fig. 11) were sometimes accompanied by a rubric claiming that the
mensura vulneris – the measure of the wound – had been granted an indulgence of seven
years by Pope Innocent VIII (1484-92), which could be claimed by placing the design in
one’s house, wearing it, kissing it, or simply looking at it (Fig. 12).220 As Flora Lewis
notes, “these large red forms, with their vertical axis […], often shown bleeding, have a
powerful sexuality, noted unwillingly by the seventeenth-century reformer Jean-Baptiste
Thiers.”221 Francisco Vaz da Silva summarizes the understanding of the anchoress Julian
of Norwich (ca. 1342-1416) on the topic thus: “it is the motherly work of the Second

(a)
Fig. 10. The Holy Lance or Spear of Destiny. 222 Purportedly the lance
that pierced the side of Jesus as he hung on the cross, this item was the
most important symbol of power of the Holy Roman Emperors. In reality,
it began as a simple winged pennant lance of the late 8th century CE.
Following his coronation as emperor in Rome in 800 CE, Charlemagne
had it reworked into a reliquary of the Passion that was to correspond to
the Lancea Domini of the Byzantine emperor in its outward appearance.223

18
 Fig. 11. Christ’s side-wound. The wound and the arma Christi in the Psalter and
Hours of Bonne de Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy. Before 1349, France (Paris);
probably workshop of Jean Le Noir.224

Person [of the Trinity] to bear humankind in spiritual birth through a bleeding wound
assimilated to a vagina in travail.”225 It therefore comes as no surprise that such images
were used as talismans for safe childbirth, and were often included in birth girdles.226

In figurative art, the bleeding side-wound is almost always portrayed as a horizontal

incision (e.g., Fig. 13) to minimise the resemblance of its bloody effusions to menstrual

19
 Fig. 12. “The Measure of the Side Wound and the Body of Christ, an Indulgence.” Hand-
coloured woodcut, by unknown German artist, ca. 1500. 227 The red side-wound serves as
Christ’s body, the cloth of Veronica (Fig. 14) as his head. The scroll to the left says: “This is
the length and width of Christ’s wound which was pierced in his side on the Cross. Whoever
kisses [it …] will have […] seven years indulgence.”228

emissions, which would have carried severely negative connotations (Lev 15:19-30).229
Yet the connection between the two is underscored by the early identification of the
haemorrhagic woman whom Jesus healed (Luke 8:43, Mark 5:25-34, Matt 9:20-22) with
Veronica, the woman of legend who captured his true image (vera icon) in bloody sweat
on a cloth (Fig. 14), and the medieval identification of this woman with Jesus himself.230

20
 Fig. 13. The Man of Sorrows.
Meister Francke, ca. 1435. 231
Note the horizontal orientation
of the side-wound.

Fig. 14. Veronica. From the

right wing of the diptych St.
John and Veronica, by Hans
Memling (ca. 1483). Veronica,
who consoled Christ on the
road to Golgotha, holds the
“sudarium” or sweat-cloth that
had become imprinted with his
face. The cloth is known as “the
Veil of Veronica” or simply as
“the Veronica.”

21
Francisco Vaz da Silva argues that “the figure of Veronica – the true image of Christ in
womanly shape – synthesizes the Hemorrhissa’s flux and the Christ’s bleeding. […] And
recall that such redemption of blood by blood is what the ‘true image’ of Jesus is about,
for Veronica personifies throughout centuries the mutual mirroring of menstrual and
sacrificial blood. […] In short, the incarnate godhead redeems humankind by opposing
the blood of Mary [via Jesus] to that of Eve, and sacrificial bloodshed to menstrual
bleeding.”232 In medieval paintings of the crucifixion and deposition, such associations
are acknowledged by “the traditional ‘blood-hyphen’ motif – a trickle of gore uniting the
chest wound and the genital region.”233 This flow (Figs. 15 & 16) also links the last
wound of Christ (the side-wound) with the first, namely his circumcision, and thus serves
as a “blood hyphen between commencement and consummation” of the divine blood
sacrifice.234,235

Caroline Walker Bynum, author of the book Jesus as Mother, has highlighted other
female aspects of the crucified Jesus that were perceived by the medieval mind.236 Most
obviously, Christ’s wounds were seen as breasts where the seeker of salvation could
suckle and draw nourishment.237,238,239 Accordingly, Bernard of Clairvaux advised his
charges to “suck not so much the wounds as the breasts of the Crucified […] He will be
your mother, and you will be his son.”240, 241 The breast/wound equivalence was readily
accommodated by medieval medicine, which considered breast-milk to be processed
blood.242 The placement of the side-wound meant that, of all five injuries, it was the one
with the most physical resemblance to a lactating breast.243 Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167)

Fig. 15. The Man of Sorrows.

Meister des Imhoff-Altars, ca.
1420.244 Note the “blood-hyphen”
connecting the side-wound and
genital region.

22
 Fig. 16. The Man of Sorrows. From the Predella (ca. 1500) of the Allerheiligenaltar in the
southern nave of the Stadtkirche in Murrhardt, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. 245 Note the
“blood-hyphen” connecting the side-wound and genital region.

was one writer to develop the idea of Jesus as a nursing mother,246 thereby unwittingly
echoing the parallel drawn by Jesus in Thomas 22:2 between nursing babies and those
who enter the kingdom of God. Leo Steinberg observes of Quirizio da Murano’s painting
The Saviour (ca. 1460-1478) (Fig. 17) that “His tunic opens like a wetnurse’s smock, and
fingers of his left hand tend to the wound like maternal fingers expressing breast milk.
Moreover, the painter […] has pitched the wound at the nipple, and not two inches below
where it usually sides.”247

The side-wound is frequently depicted as a place of refuge for the faithful.248,249 Julian of
Norwich was granted a vision in which the side-wound appeared as “a fair, delectable
place, and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and love.”250

Fig. 17. The Saviour. Christ

Showing his side-wound and
the Host to a Poor Clare nun,
by Quirizio da Murano, Venice,
fl. 1460 to 1478.251

23
Its conceptual link with the birth of the Church or rebirth of the believer’s spirit meant
that this place of refuge was often given the protective attributes of a womb.252
Sometimes the connection was made explicit, as in the writing of Abbot Guerric of Igny
(d. ca. 1157)253 and in the widely-diffused 13th-century text, Stimulus Amoris. In the latter,
the (male) author resolves to enter the wound and, in Flora Lewis’s assessment, “dwells
in Christ’s bowels as the Virgin carried Christ in her womb […]. Even after birth, he
knows he can return again and again, [in an] eroticised fantasy of an endless return to the
womb.”254

In sum, medieval authors “construct the idea that the soul enters Christ’s side, nurses
from it as if from a breast, and is born from it as from a womb.”255 All of these female
traits are manifested at the “one hinging moment” between Good Friday and the morning
of Easter Sunday, when, in Leo Steinberg’s words:
It is as if Christ’s maleness were intermitted during his death. […] In liturgical time this same
interval […] is co-eternal with the Christological cycle; and within this duration the God-man’s
corpse assumes woman-like powers. The sacrificial body, specifically the wound in Christ’s side,
now ministers in ways that may be, and that have been, expressed in female symbols. In one
category of metaphors, the wound is said to lactate and give birth.256
Francisco Vaz da Silva points out that this feminization fulfils the traditional requirement
for the victims of ritual blood sacrifices to be female, symbolically if not biologically. For
support, he points to the practice (in Europe, Africa and beyond) of castrating sacrificial
boars and bulls and then applying female terms to them, such as calling the emasculated
boar a “sow.”257

The dual-gender male

The Jesus-as-mother imagery of the Middle Ages is a specific embodiment of what I will
refer to generically as the “dual-gender male” (Fig. 18a). Jenny Bledsoe describes the
medieval construct – and, by implication, all manifestations of the dual-gender male – as
“androcentrically androgynous,” and warns that its androcentric agenda subverts the
feminine, representing it as physically and spiritually inferior to the masculine.258
Nevertheless, the dual-gendered male represents an improvement over the male

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Fig. 18. Proposed symbol scheme. The series takes its lead from Marcus
Werthmann, whose designed the symbol in the first panel to represent an
androgyne of male appearance. (a) Dual-gender male.259 (b) Phallic female.260
Symbols for two other categories that we will encounter near the end of the
paper follow, namely (c) Virile woman and (d) WomanChrist.261

24
androgynes resulting from the castration or syndromic feminization of men, for which
sterility is the norm. Could this new paradigm, which appears to be fertile and nurturing,
be a challenger to the “phallic female” of the great goddess? It is time to seek some
additional examples of the new template.

One instance of a dual-gender male with creative power occurs in ancient Egyptian
cosmogony, an interesting coincidence in view of the Gnostic Gospels’ discovery in
Egypt and the importance of Alexandria to the development of Gnosticism.262 The
Heliopolitan creator-god Atum (Fig. 19) “is said to produce his progeny by an act of
masturbation or expectoration. This leads to the idea that he is a bisexual being: in the
Coffin Texts, he is mentioned with the double pronoun ‘he-she.’ [… O]ne has to face the
fact that no semblance of physical bisexuality is present; there is no parallel to Greek
hermaphroditism or the Orphic Phanes, where male and female features are combined in
one body. Rather, in a process akin to metaphor or allegory, the physical processes
described are paradoxical fantasies; they suggest an urge to imagine a bisexual divine
being who initiates the whole movement of creation, but who yet remains a totally male
figure.”263

The tendency for this concept to recur in human societies is attested by the fact that, once
again, we find a corresponding belief among the Gimi tribe of Papua New Guinea. This
group holds that “the power to create is derived from the union of sexual opposites in
male form,” a conjunction that allows the male initiate to act as his own creator.264 In
contrast, the combination of these attributes in female form spells doom.265 Gimi men
fear the female androgyne (Fig. 18b) because, in their view, a female with an inner male
would be complete, “sated – filled up, and therefore unwilling to accept the male back

Fig. 19. Atum. Representation of

Atum in the First Book of Breathing
of Usirur. 266 Books of Breathing are
late ancient Egyptian funerary texts
(4th century BCE to 2nd century CE),
intended to enable deceased people to
continue to exist in the afterlife.

25
again out of the collective kore [spiritual reservoir of the forest], preventing his rebirth
into an individuated human society.”267 As we read above of the phallic female goddess,
“She is an image that is complete – unto herself.”268 It is this self-contained completeness
that is so threatening to men. For Gimi males, it spells the end of the world. The same
fear could explain why Peter and other male disciples of Jesus were so antagonized by
Mary Magdalene.

The Adamic paradigm

The second logion of the Gospel of Thomas has Jesus say “Let one who seeks not stop
seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one
will marvel and will reign over all.” Thus far, we have sought the meaning of the final
logion of the same gospel, a task that has required us to explore concepts and attributes of
gender in relation to Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus. The spiritual
negativity attributed to femaleness in the Gnostic literature and found today in many
traditional societies is indeed troubling. Can we – male and female seekers in the modern
Western world – arrive at a less misogynistic reading of logion 114, so that we can begin
to marvel?

Perhaps logion 114 becomes a little less troubling when Jesus’s statement is viewed more
strictly through the lens of Hebrew cosmogony. Although Genesis attributes the Creation
to a wholly male deity,269 the narrative harbours a tacit admission of divine androgyny270
in that the newly-formed Adam, who is the image of God, contains both genders.271 The
Hebrew of Gen 1:27 translates as “So God created Adam in his image, in the image of
God he created him, male and female he created them.” The original Adam is a dual-
gender male, and it is not until Gen 2:21 that the female, Eve, is extracted from his
side.272 In this idiom, it is to reflect the primal Adam of Gen 1:27-2:20, the prototype
human who mirrors the primal unity of God, that Mary needs to be made male.273
Metaphorically, the spear-thrust into the side of the crucified Jesus may be seen as “the
beginning of God’s spiritual surgery” which leads, not to the formation of a breast or
birth canal, but to the reinsertion of the rib of Gen 2:21,274 thereby “putting Eve back into
Adam, Mary back into Jesus, female back into male.”275 In this way is recreated the dual-
gender male, “the masculine unisex ideal of the gnostics.”276 The symbolism was
understood in the same way by Frederick Bruce, who expressed it thus:
Jesus’s promise that she [Mary] will become a man, so as to gain admittance to the kingdom
of heaven, envisages the reintegration of the original order, when Adam was created male and
female (Genesis 1.27). Adam was ‘the man’ as much before the removal of Eve from his side
as after (Genesis 2.18-25). Therefore, when the primal unity is restored and death is abolished,
man will still be man (albeit more perfectly so), but woman will no longer be woman; she will
be reabsorbed into man.277

Or, in the more general gloss provided by Paul in Gal 3:28, “there is no longer male and
female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

It is clear that (re)union in the Adamic paradigm requires entry of the female into the
male. This was foreshadowed above by the dove of the Song in the Quia Amore Langueo
poem, the female bird/soul who nests in Christ’s side-wound, and whom Hippolytus of

26
Rome identifies with Mary Magdalene.278 More specifically, it is helpful to note that
logion 68 of the Gospel of Philip279 may be translated “In the days (when) Eve was
within Adam, death did not exist. (When) she was separated from him, death came into
being. If again she goes into (him), and he takes her into himself, death shall not exist.”280
Equally, Jesus’s opening words about Mary in logion 114 of Thomas can have the sense
of “Look, I will draw her into myself so I may make her male.”281,282 While helpful in
visualizing the process, these declarations of the Adamic paradigm are problematic in
terms of agency. However translated, Jesus’s remark about Mary carries an undeniable
androcentric bias: it is Jesus who will make Mary male. This, however, appears to be an
oversight, a point that we will discuss further below. The final statement of the logion,
and thus of the whole gospel, promises that “every female who makes herself male will
enter heaven’s kingdom.” All of the necessary agency resides with the female.

Enlightening Eve

Thus far, we have established that (re)union in the Adamic paradigm, the formation of the
dual-gender male, requires entry of the female into the male. But what if Mary
Magdalene – gendered differently to Jesus and most of his entourage – understood things
differently? Perhaps she envisaged the salvific union as it is described in the Gnostic
Exegesis on the Soul, where “The soul, described in the usual fashion as a woman, is
joined to her heavenly bridegroom, her brother, and ‘[once] they unite [with one another]
they become a single life’ (II 132, 34-35), thus re-establishing the primordial oneness
which existed before the fall of the soul from God.”283 Here, the sexual imagery of the
wedding chamber suggests that the spiritual entry of the male into the female is what is
needed, not the reverse. Tradition has long associated the Magdalene with sexual union,
whether as prostitute (by Church teaching)284 or as Jesus’s lover/wife (in Gnostic
circles),285,286 so she would probably have been more receptive to an allegory that
required her to internalize a male than to a metaphor that required her to be internalized
by one. And, of course, the ancient template of the phallic female (Figs. 2-4) makes
visible just such a spiritual construct: a female form with a male core.

In Jacques-E. Ménard’s view, “Mary Magdalene senses the interior man, Adam, in
herself, and thereby understands everything.”287,288 If so, it suggests that the phallic
female is a more fruitful spiritual template for her – and, by extension, all women – than
the dual-gendered male. For men, the requirement remains the Adamic paradigm of
reincorporating Eve, putting Mary back into Jesus;289 if Jesus spoke of drawing Mary into
himself in Thomas 114:2,290 it would have been for his gnosis, not hers. In the proposed
scheme, gnosis, in terms of gender, is symmetrical:291 the male must incorporate the
female, the female must assimilate the male. In the Dialogue of the Saviour and Pistis
Sophia, Mary achieved full enlightenment; she was “the woman who knew the All,”
praised by Jesus as “the pleroma of all pleromas and the completion of all completions,”
a being whom he acknowledged “had completely become pure spirit.”292 Statistically,
having Mary as the star pupil of a class full of men293 suggests that it may be easier for
women to attain enlightenment than men. In terms of the metaphor being developed in
this paper, we could say that it appears to be easier for a woman become a phallic female
Eve than for a man to become a dual-gendered Adam. However verbalized, the

27
apparently greater facility of the female to incorporate the male does, of course, reflect
biological reality in the physical world. A further transcendence (or transgression)294 of
ontological boundaries allows us to draw an interesting meta-conclusion. In contrast to
the situation in developmental biology, where – as explained above – it is easier to make
a male more female than vice versa, in terms of spiritual development it looks as if it may
be easier to make a female more male.

The virile womanChrist

Other scholars have conceptualised female spirituality in ways that are highly relevant to
the current discussion. In particular, we should acknowledge the categories developed by
Barbara Newman in her analysis of medieval female piety. Newman contrasts the
category of “virile woman,” a pre-medieval idealization of female spirituality aligned
with the Aristotelian identification of spirit as male, with the later development of a
template that she calls “womanChrist,” the chaste and abject woman of holy poverty who
identifies with the suffering Virgin and the crucified Christ (Fig. 18c,d). The former is
“fearless, outspoken, always ready for death – unmoved alike by family ties and
tyrannical force;”295 the latter “intimate, impassioned, always ready for love – and moved
by every suffering creature’s pain.”296 Although essentially competing categories, in
practice it was not uncommon for aspects of the virile woman and womanChrist to
coexist in a single individual.297 It is probably best to envisage Newman’s two categories
as arising from an axis orthogonal to the dyad of phallic female and dual-gendered male,
as shown in Fig. 20. This tentative scheme recognizes that both of Newman’s categories

Fig. 20. Barbara Newman’s categories related to those of the present paper.
The graph shows a tentative mapping of the relationship between Newman’s categories
(virile woman and womanChrist) and those developed in the current work (phallic female
and dual-gendered male). “Living spirit” relates to logion 114 of the Gospel of Thomas, i.e.,
“a living spirit like you males.” Symbols are expanded from the set given in Fig. 18.298

28
have elements in common with the phallic female construct. For example, there is overlap
between the self-containment of the virile woman and the completeness-unto-herself of
the phallic female; equally, Newman identifies the womanChrist with “the Goddess
ideal,”299 which recalls the Neolithic/Paleolithic origins of the phallic female template.

It is especially interesting that Newman’s two alternatives – virile woman and

womanChrist – coincide completely in the understanding of Mary Magdalene presented
in the 14th-century Schwester Katrei,300 a text that we met briefly above. The author,
“Sister Catherine,” is purportedly the daughter of the medieval German mystic, Meister
Eckhart, whom she is instructing after she had achieved union with God.301 In this
decidedly Gnostic narrative, Mary – Sister Catherine’s exemplar – is shown as
progressing from love of the world to love of Christ’s humanity, and then transcending
her attachment to Jesus’s bodily presence to become “truly virile,” outperforming all of
the other apostles in preaching.302 Finally, during a retreat into the wilderness, Mary
Magdalene – “pure virgin, noble lover, virile woman, peerless preacher, and solitary
adept”303 – “received God from God; she reached union and was established.”304 As
Newman writes, “At this juncture the virile woman is the womanChrist, the divine amie
perfected to the point that she can ‘become God’ for herself and others.”305 All aspects of
this coincidentia oppositorum, along with the Magdalene’s medieval role in dispensing
fertility (discussed above), can be encompassed by the concept of the phallic female.

Epilogue

Probably the greatest blessing conferred by the potentially grotesque paradox of a dual-
gendered male or the faintly comical reification of the phallic female is the realisation
that gender-based metaphors of spirit, while ubiquitous in the ancient and medieval world
and still prevalent among traditional peoples today, are anthropomorphic idioms with
severe limitations. Ultimately, all analogies fail, and – insofar as they are hypersexual
rather than asexual visions – both of these concepts/conceits are flawed. As a man, Jesus
would presumably have related best to enlightenment in terms of the Adamic dual-
gendered male, and would have had reason to emphasise this androcentric paradigm
when speaking to disciples such as Peter.

Equally, Jesus seems to have been aware of the Adamic construct’s bias and limitations.
For example, in logion 22 of Thomas (a passage quoted near the beginning of this paper)
Jesus requires us to “make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be
male nor the female be female.” Likewise, in the lost Gospel of the Egyptians, a Greek
work mentioned in Patristic literature,306 Jesus reportedly says that seekers will enter the
kingdom “when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor
female.”307 Paul too, as we have seen, recognized that in redemption “there is no longer
male and female” (Gal 3:28). Asexual admonitions of this kind warn that we need to
move beyond gender categories in order to enter the kingdom.308 It is only when gender-
based analogies of spirit are relinquished,309 and their shortcomings transcended, that the
seeker will be able to marvel and reign overall.

29
© Lloyd D. Graham, 2015, excluding quotations and third-party images. v05_19.5.18

Cite as: Lloyd D. Graham (2015) “Gender and gnosis: Making Mary male, making Jesus female,” online at
https://www.academia.edu/19327057/Gender_and_gnosis_Making_Mary_male_making_Jesus_female.

All online resources were accessed Nov 2015, unless otherwise stated.

1
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley (1985) “An Interpretation of Logion 114 in ‘The Gospel of Thomas,’” Novum
Testamentum 27 (3), 245-272, at 250.
2
Roger von Oech (2001) Expect the Unexpected, or You Won't Find It: A Creativity Tool Based on the
Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus, Free Press, New York, p.34, and online at
http://thinkexist.com/quotes/roger_von_oech/2.html.
3
James M. Robinson (1990) “Introduction,” In: The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd
edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.22-26.
4
Marvin Meyer (1992) The Gospel of Thomas – The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, HarperSanFrancisco, p.5.
5
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.3.
6
Robert W. Funk (1996) Honest to Jesus – Jesus for a New Millennium, Hodder & Stoughton, Rydalmere,
NSW, p.135.
7
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.4.
8
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.21.
9
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.7-8.
10
E.g., “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”
11
Samuel Zinner (2011) The Gospel of Thomas, The Matheson Trust, London, p.46-47.
12
Recto of fragment. Online at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P._Oxy._1.jpg.
13
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p. 61, 27 & 25.
14
Marvin Meyer (2003) Secret Gospels: Essays on Thomas and the Secret Gospel of Mark, Trinity Press
International, Harrisburg PA, p.24, 68 & 100.
15
Richard Valantasis (1997) The Gospel of Thomas, Routledge, London, p.6-8.
16
Bart D. Ehrman (2003) Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.xii.
17
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.11.
18
Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.124.
19
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.10.
20
Valantasis, The Gospel of Thomas, p.13.
21
Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.125 & 135.
22
Robert W. Funk (1993) The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: New Translation
and Commentary, Polebridge Press/Macmillan, New York.
23
Funk, Honest to Jesus.
24
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.11.
25
Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.302 (original italics for emphases removed).
26
Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.149-162 & 305.
27
Harold Bloom (1992) “A Reading,” In: Marvin Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.125-136, at p.131.
28
Bloom, “A Reading,” p.125.
29
Gender transformation is present in even the earliest mythology of ancient Egypt and the Near East. Of
greatest relevance is the possible requirement for Egyptians to identify transiently with the male god
Osiris after death, which would have obliged Egyptian women “to shift their gender and ‘masculinize’
themselves to enter the Fields of Peace and other realms of the afterlife” [Kathlyn M. Cooney (2010)
“Gender Transformation in Death: A Case Study of Coffins from Ramesside Egypt,” Near Eastern
Archaeology 73 (4), 224-237; note that aspects of Cooney’s position must be qualified in light of Mark
Smith (2017) Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millenia, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, p.211-216]. An example of gender fluidity within the pantheon is offered by
the goddess Neith, who is called “the man who acts as a woman, the woman who acts as a man” [Gay
Robins (2014) “Gender and Sexuality,” In: A Companion to Egyptian Art, ed. Melinda K Hartwig,
Wiley, London, p.130].

30
 In the Mesopotamian pantheon, the goddess Ishtar/Inanna is described as follows: “She (Ishtar)
[changes] the right side (male) into the left side (female), she [changes] the left side into the right side,
she [turns] a man into a woman, she [turns] a woman into a man, she ador[ns] a man as a woman, she
ador[ns] a woman as a man.” [Rivkah Harris (1991) “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of
Opposites,” History of Religions 30 (3), 261-278, at 270].
30
Marvin W. Meyer (1985) “Making Mary Male: the Categories ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in the Gospel of
Thomas,” New Testament Studies 31 (4), 554 -570, at 567.
31
John N. Sieber (1990) “Zostrianos (VIII,1),” In: The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd
edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.402-430, at p.430.
32
Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.567.
33
Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.33. “The kingdom” is Meyer’s interpolation for a lacuna in the
manuscript.
34
Meyer, “Making Mary Male.”
35
Marvin Meyer (2003) Secret Gospels: Essays on Thomas and the Secret Gospel of Mark, Trinity Press
International, Harrisburg PA, p.96-108.
36
John D. Turner (1990) “The Book of Thomas the Contender (II,7),” In: The Nag Hammadi Library, ed.
James M. Robinson, 3rd edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.199-207, at p.206.
37
Joseph A. Gibbons (1990) “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (VII,2),” In: The Nag Hammadi
Library, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.362-371, at p.369.
38
Helmut Koester & Elaine H. Pagels (1990) “The Dialogue of the Savior (III,5),” In: The Nag Hammadi
Library, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.244-255, at p.244.
39
Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.566.
40
Maurice Bloch & Jonathan Parry (1982) “Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life” In: Death
and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge University Press, eds. Maurice Bloch & Jonathan Parry,
Cambridge, p.1-44, esp. p.18-27.
41
Bloch & Parry, “Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life,” p.21.
42
On the universal maleness of bones, and the identification of semen with bone marrow, see Francisco
Vaz da Silva (2008) Archeology of Intangible Heritage, Peter Lang, New York, p.15-16.
43
Bloch & Parry, “Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life,” p.24.
44
Bloch & Parry, “Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life,” p.22.
45
E.g., Marija Gimbutas (1999) The Living Goddesses, Univ. California Press, Berkeley & LA, p.3.
46
Marija Gimbutas (1982) Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Univ. California Press, Berkeley & LA, p.
133,135, 152-157 & 217-218; Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses, p.37.
47
Lloyd D. Graham (2013) “Terracotta Fertility Figurines of Prehistoric Eurasian Design from Modern
East Africa,” online at
http://www.academia.edu/4685518/Terracotta_fertility_figurines_of_prehistoric_Eurasian_design_from_modern_
East_Africa.
48
Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, p.152.
49
Miriam Robbins Dexter (1999) “Editor’s Preface” In: Marija Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses, Univ.
California Press, Berkeley & LA, p.xvi-xvii.
50
Jean-Marie Dederen (2010) “Women’s power, 1000 A.D.: Figurine art and gender politics in prehistoric
southern Africa,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 19 (1), 23-42, at 36-37.
51
For detailed front and rear views, see Gimbutas, p.37 (Fig. 31), reproduced with permission as Fig. 1.11c
in Graham, “Terracotta Fertility Figurines of Prehistoric Eurasian Design from Modern East Africa.”
For a wider context, see Valeska Becker (2007) “Early and Middle Neolithic Figurines – The
Migration of Religious Belief,” Documenta Praehistorica 34, 119-127.
52
“This magnificent female representation was misinterpreted by M. GIMBUTAS (1989:231, fig. 358) as a
phallic figurine. […] According to this author this figurine has a phallic head with lower part shaped
like testicles.” No rationale is given for Makkay’s disagreement with Gimbutas. János Makkay (2007)
The Excavations of the Early Neolithic Sites of the Körös Culture in the Körös Valley, Hungary: The
Final Report, Vol. 1 – The Excavations, Stratigraphy, Structures and Graves, Società per la Preistoria
Protostoria della Regione Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Qaderno 11), Trieste, p.121 (incl. fn. 141); drawings
at Fig. 67.1 (p.110).
Others agree with Gimbutas. For example, Adele Änggård writes “Another figurine that is
determinedly androgynous, this time with a typical Old European sense of humour, is the lively little

31
 Starčevo figurine, who is clearly dual gendered (fig. 46). She exudes fun, having a delicious wit about
her. The arms appear like stumps when seen from the back; however, they might well represent breasts
when seen from the side. The elongated body and head make the legless buttocks so clearly a phallus
form. […] There is something particular about the humour in figure 46. The Starčevo figurine laughs at
both sexes without being malicious to either. […] To find such expressions of gender unity, sculpted
over such long periods, indicates durability and sagacity in the beliefs.” Adele Änggård (2014) A
Humanitarian Past – Antiquity’s Impact on Present Social Conditions, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN,
p.75.
53
Hungarian National Museum. Author’s photograph.
54
History & Archaeology Museum in Piatra Neamţ, Romania. Photo by CristianChirita (Own work) [CC
BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SoborulZeitelor3Cucuteni.JPG
55
Stella Richards (2004) “Baba Yaga and the Great Phallic Goddess,” San Francisco Jung Institute Library
Journal 23 (1), 54-66, at 59.
56
Michele Stephen (2003) “Male Mothers and Cannibal Women: A Kleinian Interpretation of Male
Initiation in the New Guinea Highlands,” Psychoanalytic Review 90, 615-653.
57
Interestingly, the corresponding myth of settled/urban society has the opposite polarity: in Sumerian
mythology, Inanna (the goddess of sex, patroness of Unug/Uruk) tricks Enki (the god of civilization,
patron of Eridu) into giving his divine powers to her. Paul Kriwaczek (2010) Babylon – Mesopotamia
and the Birth of Civilization, Atlantic Books, London, p.34-37.
58
E.g., Andrew Lattas (1989) “Trickery and Sacrifice: Tambarans and the Appropriation of Female
Reproductive Powers in Male Initiation Ceremonies in West New Britain,” Man (New Series) 24 (3),
451-469.
59
E.g., Sylvie Poirier (2005) A World of Relationships – Itineraries, Dream, and Events in the Australian
Western Desert, Univ. Toronto Press, Toronto, p.204.
60
E.g., Yolanda Murphy & Robert F. Murphy (2004) Women of the Forest, Columbia University Press,
New York, p.113-116.
61
E.g., Toyin Falola & Nana Akua Amponsah (2012) Women’s Roles in Sub-Saharan Africa, Greenwood,
Santa Barbara, CA, pp.86-87.
62
A similar motif is found in many creation myths. “The Greek and Babylonian myths closely resemble
each other, since in both the main character at the center of the plot is the great mother (Tiamat, Gaea,
or similarly, Anat, Baal’s mate in the Ugaritic myth), and in each instance power is transferred, after a
bloody struggle, to a male god who rules the world.” Admiel Kosman (2012), Gender and Dialogue in
the Rabbinic Prism, [Studia Judaica 50], trans. Edward Levin, De Gruyter, Berlin & Boston, p.163-164.
63
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.51.
64
Royal Ontario Museum. Image by Daderot (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amlash-
style_mother_goddess,_3_of_5,_perhaps_Amlash,_Northern_Iran,_Iron_Age,_c._1200-
900_BC,_earthenware_-_Royal_Ontario_Museum_-_DSC04534.JPG
65
Neues Museum, Berlin. Author’s photograph.
66
For further examples, see Graham, “Terracotta Fertility Figurines of Prehistoric Eurasian Design from
Modern East Africa,” Section 1.4.1.
67
Graham, “Terracotta Fertility Figurines of Prehistoric Eurasian Design from Modern East Africa.”
68
Conan Kennedy (1997) Ancient Ireland – The Users’ Guide, Morrigan Book Company, Killala, Co.
Mayo, Ireland; Kindle Edition, locations 3248-3249. Speculatively, Kennedy continues “Modern male
transvestites may very well be driven by some stray inherited characteristic connected to all this. It is
interesting to note that the majority of such transvestites appear to want to perform functions related to
female public sexuality, to coin a phrase. Rather than getting themselves up as housekeepers or child
minders, other ‘traditional’ female functions, or indeed even as female executives or professionals, the
modern transvestites attire themselves as prostitutes, dancers, strippers or whatever.” (Kindle locations
3250-3254).
69
Stephen J. Patterson (ca. 2015) “The Praying Androgynes of Corinth,” online at
http://www.stephenjpatterson.org/posts/xw2w92xe8u3vcjoorcqfgoabll47ab.

32
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Caroline Walker Bynum (1986) “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo
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Marvin Meyer (2001) “Albert Schweitzer and the Image of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas,” In: Jesus
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Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.564.
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Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.564-565.
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Like the traditional societies discussed earlier in this section, the Gnostics too can be considered to have
split the primal androgyne into a dyad of opposing constellations. Here, however, the composition of
the two constellations is somewhat different to before, with male/spirit/truth/incorruptible/good being
opposed to female/fertility/corruption/death/bad.
75
Barbara Newman (1995) From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Univ. Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia,
p.4.
76
Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” 421.
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Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.180.
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Balthasar Denner [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, online at
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Peucker, “‘Inspired by Flames of Love,’” 54-58.
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Peucker, “‘Inspired by Flames of Love,’” 59 & 63.
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Ann Oakley (2015) Sex, Gender and Society, Ashgate Publishing, p.26.
100
DaveSquirrel (2011) “The Default Human is FEMALE,” Twanzphobic Since Forever, blog post 14 Apr,
online at https://twanzphobic.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/the-default-human-is-female/
101
DaveSquirrel, “The Default Human is FEMALE.”
102
Judith Roof (2007) The Poetics of DNA, Univ. Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p.115-138.
103
Attacks that denigrate the Y-chromosome have at times been vitriolic. For example, in 1967, Valerie
Solanas used the “Y as incomplete X” fallacy to claim that “The male [...] has an incomplete set of
chromosomes [... and thus] is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.”
S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, online at http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm.
104
Yen-Shan Chen, Joseph D. Racca, Nelson B. Phillips & Michael A. Weiss (2013) “Inherited Human Sex
Reversal Due To Impaired Nucleocytoplasmic Trafficking of SRY Defines a Male Transcriptional
Threshold,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110 (38), E3567-3576.
105
Chen et al., “Inherited human sex reversal.”
106
Susan Haskins (1993) Mary Magdalen – Myth and Metaphor, Riverhead Books, New York, p.1-94.
107
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.14-29.
108
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.14 & 93.
109
Lisa Bellevie (2005) The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mary Magdalene, Alpha Books/Penguin, New York,
p.29.
110
See, e.g., Buthaina I. Zanayed (2009) The Visual Representation of Mary Magdalene in Art: From
Penitent Saint to Propagator of the Faith, MA Thesis, Univ. Houston – Clear Lake, p.19-22.
111
Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.18-19. On the Talmudic identification of Jesus’s mother as the adulterous
Miriam megadla neshaya, see Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.38, and Yair Furstenberg (2015) “The
Midrash of Jesus and the Bavli’s Counter-Gospel,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 22, 303-324 , at 313 (incl.
fn 30).

34
112
Marina Warner (1983) Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, Vintage, New York,
p.344.
113
Cau Ferrat Museum. El Greco [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El_Greco-_Penitent_Magdalene.JPG.
114
Katherine Ludwig Jansen (2001) The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the
Later Middle Ages, Princeton Univ. Press, p.29-30.
115
Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, p.30; Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.410 fn 90.
116
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.89-90.
117
Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, p.30.
118
Stephen J. Shoemaker (2003) “A Case of Mistaken Identity? Naming the Gnostic Mary,” In: Which
Mary? – The Marys of Early Christian Tradition, edited by F. Stanley Jones, p.5-30, at p.7-8.
119
Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.562.
120
Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.562.
121
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.60-64.
122
Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.45-49; Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.37-38.
123
Most recently, the idea of Jesus and Mary as married has been bolstered by the discovery of a 7th/8th-
century Coptic papyrus fragment in which Jesus refers to his wife. However, the authenticity of the
fragment is hotly debated and it seems increasingly likely that it is a modern forgery. Karen L. King
(2014) ““Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’”: A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment,” Harvard Theological
Review, 107 (2), 131-159; David W. Kim (2015) “Re-considering the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: An
Imperfect Forgery or Another Polemical Gnostic Fragment,” Religious Studies and Theology 34 (1),
19-40.
124
MetMuseum (2000) “The Cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages," In: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art
History, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
online at http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/virg/hd_virg.htm.
125
Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.19.
126
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.62.
127
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.62-64, 77, 92-94 & 138.
128
Michael O’Carroll (2000) Theotokos: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Wipf &
Stock Publishers, Eugene, OR, p.139-141.
129
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.115-119.
130
Robin Griffith-Jones (2008) Mary Magdalene: The Woman Whom Jesus Loved, Canterbury Press,
Norwich, p.51 & 103.
131
O’Carroll, Theotokos, p.333-334.
132
Modern creation, © unknown artist. Image available at various sites online, including
http://www.badderhomesandgardens.com/2012/04/02/the-vagina-mary/. For similar, see
https://jonathanjohnson.de/en/collaborations/micki-tschur/vagina-madonna-salt-shaker-ceramic and
https://plus.google.com/+IvanRaszl/posts/arKQvLZQXmr.
133
Rik Peels (2015) “Does God Have a Sense of Humor?” Faith and Philosophy 32 (3), 271-292.
134
Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.158.
135
This is an opportune juncture at which to mention the medieval phenomenon of “sexual pilgrim badges”
in which autonomous penises and vulvas behave (with comic effect) as humans, birds, fruit, etc. Ann
Marie Rasmussen observes that these fascinating objects highlight “the instability of categories of
gender” and considers them to project “female masculinity,” two themes of central relevance to the
present paper. Ann Marie Rasmussen (2013) “Hybrid Creatures – Moving Beyond Sexuality in the
Medieval Sexual Badges,” In: From Beasts to Souls – Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe,
ed. E. Jane Burns & Peggy McCracken, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, p.221-247.
136
Brooklyn Museum, accession 45.128.189. By Isidro Escamilla [No restrictions or Public domain], via
Wikimedia Commons, online at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-
_Virgin_of_Guadalupe_-_Isidro_Escamilla_-_overall.jpg.
137
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.176-177; Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.146. Also, we
might note that in Insular Celtic art the Virgin Mary is often adorned with a lozenge symbol [Mike
King (2001) “Diamonds are Forever: The Kilbroney Cross, the Book of Kells, and an Early Christian
Symbol of the Resurrection,” Lecale Miscellany (Journal of the Lecale Historical Society) no. 19, 3-13]
which since prehistoric times has served as a symbol of the female genitalia [Lloyd D. Graham (2011)

35
 “Symbolism and significance of bronze rhomboid beads/pendants from Jenné and the Inland Niger
Delta, Mali,” online at
https://www.academia.edu/457468/Symbolism_and_significance_of_bronze_rhomboid_beads_pendant
s_from_Jenn%C3%A9_and_the_Inland_Niger_Delta_Mali ].
138
Most commonly partitioned into virgin, mother, and crone. D. J. Conway (1994) Maiden, Mother, Crone:
The Myth and Reality of the Triple Goddess, Llewellyn Worldwide, St. Paul, MN.
139
John T. Irwin (2011) Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio,”
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2011, p.87 & 367; John T. Irwin (1990) “Back Home Again in Indiana:
Hart Crane’s The Bridge,” In: Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston,
Indiana Univ. Press, p.269-298, at p.274;
140
Jeanne Addison Roberts (1994) The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus and Gender, Bison
Books/Univ. Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London, 1994, p.142.
141
For a robustly modern reprise of this triad, see Feather Crawford Freed (2008) “Virgin, Mother, Whore:
The Impossible Triangle of Modern Femininity,” Location of Contestation, 25 Aug, online at
https://locationofcontestation.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/virgin-mother/.
142
E.g., Helen Singer Kaplan (1988) “Intimacy disorders and sexual panic states,” Journal of Sex &
Marital Therapy 14 (1), 3-12.
143
Doris Tishkoff (2005) Madonna/Whore: The Myth of the Two Marys, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN.
144
Kennedy, Ancient Ireland, Entry: “Trousers and the Goddess,” Kindle locations 3257-3260. Author’s
italics (for emphasis) removed as they lack context in the excerpt.
145
Margaret Starbird (1993) The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, Bear
& Co., Santa Fe, NM.
146
Margaret Starbird (1998) The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine, Bear & Co.,
Santa Fe, NM.
147
Dan Brown (2003) The Da Vinci Code, Bantam Press/Random House Australia, London, New York &
Sydney.
148
Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.248-258.
149
Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.130-131.
150
Michael P. Carroll (1992) The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins, Princeton Univ. Press,
NJ, esp. p.32ff.
151
Jane Schaberg (2004) The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian
Testament, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, p.164.
152
Karen L. King, George W. MacRae, R. McL. Wilson, Douglas M. Parrott (1990) The Gospel of Mary
(BG 8502,1), In: The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd edn., HarperSanFrancisco,
p.523-527, at p.527.
153
Herbert Christian Merillat (1997) The Gnostic Apostle Thomas – “Twin” of Jesus, Chap. 24, online at
http://gnosis.org/thomasbook/ch24.html.
154
Patricia Reis (1986) “The Mysteries of Creativity: Self-seeding, Death and the Great Goddess,”
Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought 17 (1), 11-33.
155
Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, p.157-158.
156
Esther A. de Boer (2000) “Mary Magdalene and the Disciple Jesus Loved,” Lectio Difficilior 1/2000, 1-
18, online at http://www.lectio.unibe.ch/00_1/m-forum.htm.
157
State Hermitage Museum, Russia. By unknown artist after Leonardo da Vinci [Public domain], via
Wikimedia Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_last_supper_hermitage.jpg.
158
Brown, The Da Vinci Code, p.242-250.
159
Aarathi Prasad (2008) “Virgin Conception Would be More Plausible if Mary Was a Man,” The
Guardian (Australian edition), 31 Dec, modified 1 January 2009, online at
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2008/dec/30/virgin-birth-mary.
160
Prasad, “Virgin Conception Would be More Plausible if Mary Was a Man.”
161
Prasad, “Virgin Conception Would be More Plausible if Mary Was a Man.”
162
Genetics Home Reference (NIH) “Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome,”
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/androgen-insensitivity-syndrome.
163
K.C. Knower, S. Kelly & V.R. Harley (2003) “Turning on the male – SRY, SOX9 and sex
determination in mammals,” Cytogenetic & Genome Research 101 (3-4), 185-198.

36
164
Genetics Home Reference (NIH) “Swyer Syndrome,” online at http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/swyer-
syndrome.
165
Anna Biason-Lauber, Daniel Konrad, Monika Meyer, Carine deBeaufort & Eugen J. Schoenle (2009)
“Ovaries and Female Phenotype in a Girl with 46,XY Karyotype and Mutations in the CBX2 Gene,”
American Journal of Human Genetics, 84 (5) 658-663.
166
Prasad, “Virgin Conception Would be More Plausible if Mary Was a Man.”
167
Aaron T. Norton & Ozzie Zehner (2008) “Which Half Is Mommy?: Tetragametic Chimerism and Trans-
Subjectivity,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36 (3),106-125.
168
M. Kemal Irmak (2010) “Self-fertilization in Human: Having a Male Embryo Without a Father,”
Medical Hypotheses 75 (5), 448-451.
169
M. Kemal Irmak (2014) “Embryological Basis of the Virgin Birth of Jesus,” Journal of Experimental
and Integrative Medicine 4 (2), 143-146.
170
World Health Organization, Genomic Resource Center, “Gender and Genetics,” online at
http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html.
171
The Gnostic Society Library, “The Pair (Syzygy) in Valentinian Thought,” online at
http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Syzygy_Valentinian.htm.
172
Wayne A. Meeks (1974) “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest
Christianity,” History of Religions 13 (3), 165-208, at p.185-6.
173
“Misconception: According to the traditional viewpoint, Chava [i.e., Eve] was created from one of
Adam’s ribs. Fact: According to the opinion of Rashi and many other medieval commentators,
‘woman’ was created from one side of Adam, not from his rib.” Rabbi Dr. Ari Zivotofsky (2007)
“Tzarich Iyun: Adam’s Rib,” Jewish Action Magazine, Winter 5768/2007, online at
https://www.ou.org/torah/machshava/tzarich-iyun/tzarich_iyun_adams_rib/.
174
Although it can seem counterintuitive, Juan Mascaro explains it well. “Those who rely on physical
miracles to prove the truth of spiritual things forget the ever-present miracle of the universe and our
own lives. The lover of the physical miracle is in fact a materialist: instead of making material things
spiritual, as the poet or spiritual man does, he simply makes spiritual things material, and this is the
source of all idolatry and superstition.” Juan Mascaro (1965) “Introduction” In: The Upanishads,
Penguin, p.40.
175
E.g., Stephan A. Hoeller (2002) Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing,
Quest, Wheaton, IL, p.93-128.
176
The texts were originally composed in Greek, and – although some were clearly first written in Egypt –
others probably originated elsewhere in the Greek-speaking ancient world; see James M. Robinson,
“Introduction,” p.12-13. Comparison of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas from Nag Hammadi with the
Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus (also in Egypt) show that this text was subject to change during its
transmission, and thus potentially adapted to Egyptian sensibilities; Helmut Koester (1990) “The
Gospel of Thomas (II,2)” [Introduction], In: The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M.
Robinson, 3rd edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.124-126. Indeed, many scholars have suggested that logion
114 of Thomas is a late scribal addendum to the manuscript, as reviewed by Marvin Meyer (2003)
Secret Gospels: Essays on Thomas and the Secret Gospel of Mark, Trinity Press International,
Harrisburg, p.85.
177
K. H. Rengstorf (1967) “Urchristliches Kerygma und ‘gnostische’ Interpretation in einigen Sprüchen
des Thomasevangeliums,” ed. Ugo Bianchi, In: The Origins of Gnosticism; Colloqium of Messina 13-
18 Apr 1966. Testi e Discussioni (Studies in the History of Religions, Supplement to Numen 12), Brill,
Leiden, p.563-574, at p.569.
178
Diodorus Siculus (1933) The Library of History, Loeb Classical Library edition, vol. I, p.275-276 (The
Library of History 80:4).
179
Karl W. Luckert (1991) Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of
Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective, SUNY Press, p.302.
180
Luckert (1991) Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire, p.302.
181
E.g., Margaret Merisante (2015) “Tears and Fragrance for God’s Death and Resurrection: The Funerary
Syncretism of Mary Magdalene with Isis,” Association for the Study of Women and Mythology
(ASWM) Symposium, 11 Apr , Portland, OR, online at
https://www.academia.edu/12129204/Tears_and_Fragrance_for_the_God_s_Death_and_Resurrection_
The_Funerary_Syncretism_of_Mary_Magdalene_with_Isis.

37
182
Glenn Bogue (2011) The Black Madonna – Isis and the Magdalene, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN.
183
James S. Galluzzo (2008) The Spirituality of Mary Magdalene: Embracing the Sacred Union of the
Feminine and Masculine as One, iUniverse, New York & Bloomington, IN, p.59.
184
E.g., R.E. Witt (1971) Isis in the Ancient World, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore & London,
p.272-275; Joseph A. Bailey II (2005) Echoes of Ancient African Values, Author House, Bloomington,
IN, p.30-31; Sabrina Higgins (2012) “Divine Mothers: The Influence of Isis on the Virgin Mary in
Egyptian Lactans-Iconography,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 3-4, 71-90.
185
D.M. Murdock (2008) Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection, Stellar House Publishing, USA,
p.124.
186
Eric M. Meyers & Mark A. Chancey, Alexander to Constantine – Archaeology of the Land of the Bible,
vol. 3, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven & London, p.237-259.
187
Gillian Gillison (1980) “Images of Nature in Gimi Thought,” In: Nature, Culture and Gender, eds. Carol
P. MacCormack & Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.143-173; at p.163.
188
Gillison (1980) “Images of Nature in Gimi Thought,” p.169.
189
Gillison (1980) “Images of Nature in Gimi Thought,” p.149, 156 & 169.
190
On gender in folkloristic studies of other Melanesian societies, see also Vaz da Silva, Archeology of
Intangible Heritage, p.53-58.
191
Gillison, “Images of Nature in Gimi Thought,” p.157-159.
192
According to Hippolytus, its counterpart in the Naassene Gospel According to Thomas is “If you eat the
dead and make them living, what will you do if you eat the living?” James M. Robinson, ed. (2000)
The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, Brill, Leiden, p.104.
193
Logion 7: “Jesus said, ‘Blessings on the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human.
And cursed is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion will become human.” Logion 60: “He saw a
Samaritan carrying a lamb as he was going to Judea. [...] He said to them, ‘He will not eat it while it is
alive, but only after he has killed it and it has become a carcass.’ They said, ‘Otherwise he cannot do
it.’ He said to them, ‘So also with you, seek for yourselves a place of rest, or you might become a
carcass and be eaten.’” Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas, p.23 & 45.
194
Wesley W. Isenberg (1990) “The Gospel of Philip (II,3),” In: The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M.
Robinson, 3rd edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.139-160, at p.143, 147 & 153. “Sacrificed” is Isenberg’s
interpolation for a lacuna in the first quotation.
195
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.176.
196
Flora Lewis (1997) “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered
Experience and Response,” In: Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, eds. Lesley J.
Smith, Jane H.M. Taylor, British Library & Univ. Toronto Press, p.204-229, at p.217.
197
Bynum (2002) “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” German Historical Institute Bulletin No. 30,
3-36, at 26.
198
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion,” p.216.
199
Caroline Walker Bynum (1977) “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-
Century Cistercian Writing, Harvard Theological Review 70 (3/4), 257-284, at 264-265.
200
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion,” p.204.
201
Douglas Gray (1963) “The Five Wounds of Our Lord - II,” Notes and Queries 10 (3), 82-89, at 83.
202
Caroline Walker Bynum (1986) “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Renaissance Quarterly
39 (3), 399-439, at 419;
203
Tania Oldenhage (2012) “Jesus’ Labor Pain: Rereading Birth and Crisis in the Passion Narratives,”
Lectio Difficilior 2/2012, 1-24, at 1, online at
http://www.lectio.unibe.ch/12_2/pdf/oldenhage_tania_jesus_labor_pain.pdf.
204
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.137.
205
Its roots may even date back to the time of Jesus’s ministry. The neo-apocryphal Testament of Longinus
has the eponymous Roman soldier – who inflicted the wound in Christ’s side – say of his victim “I
considered a message of reconciliation and forgiveness to be a woman’s message” (Malediction 10:6).
Although modern, the suggestion that the men of Roman Judea might have viewed Jesus’s teaching as
intrinsically effeminate is worth considering. There is no sense that the authors were aware of the
medieval feminization of the side-wound. SPLD Committee / Howard Ingham, Genevieve Podleski &
Eddy Webb (2009) The Testament of Longinus, White Wolf Publishing, Stone Mountain, GA, p.8.

38
206
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.38. As a concept, male pregnancy dates back at least to classical antiquity;
see David D. Leitao (2012) The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
207
Christina Petterson (2015) “Imagining the Body of Christ,” In: Sexuality, Ideology and the Bible –
Antipodean Engagements,” ed. Robert J. Myles & Caroline Blyth, Sheffield Phoenix Press, Sheffield,
UK, p.35-55, at p.35 & 44-45.
208
Paul Peucker (2006) “‘Inspired by Flames of Love:’ Homosexuality, Mysticism, and Moravian Brothers
around 1750,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, 30-64, at 46-64. Among male Brethren, it
became common for the side-wound to be eroticised in a homosexual manner; see Peucker, “‘Inspired
by Flames of Love,’” 43-64.
209
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS 270b, fol. 6r. This is a faithful monochrome reproduction of a two-
dimensional coloured work of art that is in the public domain by virtue of its age. The reproduction is
therefore also in the public domain; see online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing#Material_in_the_public_domain
210
For a discussion of the image, see Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” 419;
Caroline Walker Bynum (1991) Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human
Body in Medieval Religion, Zone Books, New York, p.99.
211
Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord - II,” 89.
212
Leo Steinberg (1996) The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,” 2nd edn.,
Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago & London, p.374.
213
Douglas Gray (1963) “The Five Wounds of Our Lord - III,” Notes and Queries 10 (4), 127-134, at 129.
214
“Song of Solomon 2:14, Commentaries,” online at http://biblehub.com/commentaries/songs/2-14.htm.
215
Jorunn Buckley understands logion 75 of Thomas to refer to entry of the seeker – pictured as a bride –
into a wedding chamber, with Jesus as the bridegroom, as per logion 104 [Buckley, “An Interpretation
of Logion 114 in ‘The Gospel of Thomas,’” 266-267]. Combining this with the imagery of the poem
leads to an identification of the side-wound, “hyr chambre,” with the wedding chamber of logion 75.
Identification of the wound as a wedding chamber for the dove, which in the Song of Songs is
Solomon’s lover, is consistent with its description by Luis of Granada as the “flourishinge bed of the
spouse of Salomon” (see quotation in text).
216
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion,” p.208 & 225 (note 20).
217
H. Thurston (1910) “The Holy Lance,” In: The Catholic Encyclopedia, Robert Appleton, New York,
online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08773a.htm.
218
Mechthild Schulze-Dörrlamm (2011) “Die Heilige Lanze in Wien – Die Frühgeschichte des
karolingischottonischen Herrschaftszeichens aus archäologischer Sicht.” Jahrbuch des Römisch-
Germanischen Zentralmuseums 58, 707-742.
219
Bynum (2002) “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” 20; Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and
the Instruments of the Passion, p.208.
220
Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord - II,” 88.
221
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion,” p.215.
222
Imperial Treasury, Hofburg Palace, Vienna. Author’s photographs.
223
Schulze-Dörrlamm, “Die Heilige Lanze in Wien.”
224
Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional work of
art that is in the public domain by virtue of its age. The reproduction is therefore also in the public
domain; see online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APsalter_of_Bonne_de_Luxembourg_Wound.jpg
225
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.138.
226
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion, p.217.
227
Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg, accession G 207 II. By Anonymous [Public domain], via Wikimedia
Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wundmale_Christi_c1500_ubs_G_0207_II.jpg
228
Bynum, “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” p.21 (Plate 11).
229
Joyce E. Salisbury (2000 ) “Gendered Sexuality,” In: Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, eds. Vern L.
Bullough & James Brundage, Routledge, NY & London, p.81-102, at p.89-90.
230
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.139-140.

39
231
Hamburger Kunsthalle. Master Francke [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meister_Francke_003.jpg
232
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p. 140 & 144.
233
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.136.
234
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.136.
235
Leo Steinberg (1983) “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,” October 25,
iv & 1-198 & 204-222, at 58.
236
Caroline Walker Bynum (1984) Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages,
Univ. California Press, esp. p.110-169; Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother.”
237
Jenny Bledsoe (2011) “Feminine Images of Jesus: Later Medieval Christology and the Devaluation of
the Feminine,” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 3 (1), 34-58, at 41.
238
Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,” p.273.
239
One can view this as merely the natural extension of a concept present in the ca. 2nd-century CE Odes of
Solomon 19:1-4, in which the milk of salvation originates with God the Father, with Jesus as the cup:
“A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord’s kindness. The Son is
the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him; Because
His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released. The Holy
Spirit opened Her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.” Translation online at
http://gnosis.org/library/odes.htm; for a discussion, see Edward Engelbrecht (1999) “God’s Milk: An
Orthodox Confession of the Eucharist,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (4), 509-526.
240
Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,” p.262.
241
Cf. the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, where Jesus identifies himself as both mother and son, declaring “I
am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son.” Frederick Wisse (1990) “The Apocryphon of John (II,1,
III,1, IV,1, and BG 8502,2),” In: The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd edn.,
HarperSanFrancisco, p.104-123, at p.105.
242
Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,” p.272-273.
243
Bledsoe, “Feminine Images of Jesus,” 40-41.
244
German National Museum, Nuremberg. By Meister des Imhoff-Altars [Public domain], via Wikimedia
Commons, online at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meister_des_Imhoff-Altars_001.jpg.
245
Photograph © Roman Eisele / Unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons; see online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Murrhardt_-_Stadtkirche_-_Allerheiligenaltar_-
_Predella_ohne_Rahmen.jpg.
246
Bynum “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,” p.267.
247
Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, p.370.
248
Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord - II,” at 86 & 87.
249
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion,” p.214.
250
Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord - III,” 129.
251
Academia, Venice. Quirizio da Murano [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Savior_-_Quirizio_da_Murano.jpg
252
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion,” p.215
253
Bynum “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,” p.265-266.
254
Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion,” p.216
255
Bynum “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,” p.273.
256
Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, p.366.
257
Vaz da Silva, Archeology of Intangible Heritage, p.43 & 138-139.
258
Jenny Bledsoe, “Feminine Images of Jesus,” p.35 & 54-55.
259
By MarcusWerthmann (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons, “Gender-Symbol Hermaphrodite Androgyne Male Appearance,” online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gender-
Symbol_Hermaphrodite_Androgyne_Male_Appearance_dark_transparent_Background.png.
260
This is my own composition, in the same style as Werthmann’s. Here, the arrangement of elements is
better suited to the phallic female template than that in Werthmann’s “Gender-Symbol Hermaphrodite
Androgyne Female Appearance,” which is online at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gender-
Symbol_Hermaphrodite_Androgyne_Female_Appearance_dark_transparent_Background.png.

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261
Panels (b)-(d) are my own work; to match Werthmann’s terms (see preceding notes), they are also
offered under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.
262
Roelof van den Broek (1996) Studies in Gnosticism and Alexandrian Christianity, Brill, Leiden, p.vii
263
Olaf E. Kaper (2001) “Myth,” In: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt , vol. 2, ed. Donald B.
Redford, OUP, New York, p.469-472, subsection “Osiris Cycle.”
264
Gillison (1980) “Images of Nature in Gimi Thought,” p.164 & 170. The emphasis-italics are Gillison’s.
265
Gillison (1980) “Images of Nature in Gimi Thought,” p.171.
266
Louvre Museum, accession N3284. Photograph by UnknownRama (RamaOwn work), CC BY-SA 2.0 fr
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/fr/deed.en), via Wikimedia Commons, online at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_book_of_respirations_N3284_mp3h8818.jpg.
267
Gillison (1980) “Images of Nature in Gimi Thought,” p.154.
268
Reis, “The Mysteries of Creativity.”
269
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.53.
270
The divine androgyny is nicely articulated in the Asclepius of Late Antiquity: “God, father, master of all
[…] god, the only and the all, completely full of the fertility of both sexes and ever pregnant with his
own will, always begets whatever he wishes to procreate.” Brian P. Copenhaver (1995) Hermetica:
The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and
Introduction, Cambridge Univ. Press, p.78.
271
Maryanne Cline Horowitz (1979) “The Image of God in Man: Is Woman Included?” Harvard
Theological Review 72 (3/4), 175-206.
272
To understand the mindset of Jesus and the authors/compilers of the Gnostic writings, we should take
Genesis 1-2 at face value, as opposed to indulging in the textual criticism of modern scholarship, which
sees the account as redacted from two source narratives, one written by the Yahwist (J) and the other
by the Elohist (E). However, having fleetingly raised the topic in this gender-sensitive essay, we should
note that some scholars see the Yahwist – the author of the source that contains Gen 2:15-24 – as
female. In Genesis 2, the Yahwist (J) “plays out the lovely fable of the creation of woman, a highly
original fable since […] we have no other extant account of the creation of woman from the ancient
Middle East. […] Misogyny in the West is a long and dismal history of weak misreading of the comic J,
who exalts women throughout her work, and never more than in this deliciously wry story of creation.
The lack of a sense of humor in believers and exegetes always has been and remains the largest barrier
to the understanding of J. Harold Bloom & David Rosenberg (1991) The Book of J, Faber & Faber,
London, p.146.
273
James D. Audlin (2014/5) “Making Mary Male: Is Gospel of Thomas Logion 114 Really Misogynist?”
online at
https://www.academia.edu/7959770/Making_Mary_Male_Is_Gospel_of_Thomas_Logion_114_Really
_Misogynist;
274
Buckley, “An Interpretation of Logion 114 in ‘The Gospel of Thomas.’”
275
Audlin, “Making Mary Male.”
276
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.178.
277
Frederick F. Bruce (1974) Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, Hodder &
Stoughton, London, p.153-154.
278
An identification that consolidates James Audlin’s “putting… Mary back into Jesus,” quoted above in
the text. For the identification by Hippolytus, which we have already met earlier, see Haskins, Mary
Magdalen, p.60-64.
279
Logion numbering from Isenberg, “The Gospel of Philip (II, 3),” p.150.
280
Audlin, “Making Mary Male;” see also Audlin (2015) The Gospel of John – The Original Version
Restored and Translated with Commentaries, Volcán Barú, Panama, p.383.
281
Audlin, “Making Mary Male.”
282
Nancy Dorian (2014) The Gospel of Thomas: Introduction and Commentary, Brill, Leiden, p.607.
283
Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.557.
284
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.14, 93-94, 130-134, 154 & 166-173.
285
Bellevie, Mary Magdalene, p.45-49.
286
Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p.37-38.
287
Jacques-E. Ménard (1975) L’Evangile Selon Thomas, Brill, Leiden, p.43 & 210.
288
Buckley, “An Interpretation of Logion 114 in ‘The Gospel of Thomas,’” p.247.

41
289
Audlin, “Making Mary Male.”
290
Audlin, “Making Mary Male.”
291
One might categorise the proposed scheme as a synthesis of Gnostic Christianity and Goddess
spirituality.
292
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.178.
293
Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, p.164.
294
Marjaana Lindeman & Kia Aarnio (2007) “Superstitious, Magical, and Paranormal Beliefs: An
Integrative Model, Journal of Research in Personality 41, 731-744.
295
One can easily imagine Joan of Arc as an exemplar of this type.
296
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.247.
297
Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, St. Perpetua, etc.; Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.6-11.
298
The use of a circle for spirit is common in many esoteric symbol systems; see
http://altreligion.about.com/od/westernocculttradition/ig/Elemental-Symbols/Spirit.htm. The use of a
cross for Christ is ubiquitous.
299
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.3.
300
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.175-181.
301
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.172.
302
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.175.
303
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.181.
304
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.175.
305
Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p.177-178.
306
This work is unrelated to the Nag Hammadi tract that was given the same name. Alexander Böhlig &
Frederik Wisse (1990) “The Gospel of the Egyptians (III,2 and IV,2),” In: The Nag Hammadi Library,
ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd edn., HarperSanFrancisco, p.208-219, at p.208.
307
Audlin, “Making Mary Male;” Audlin, The Gospel of John, p.381.
308
Meyer, “Making Mary Male,” p.560-561.
309
As advocated by many, including Bledsoe, “Feminine Images of Jesus.”

42